Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Chloe’s mother? She’s okay, considering everything that’s happened. They were very close. It’s going to be hard for Wanda without her.”

  Molly shook her head ruefully. “I feel just awful. I never thought of Chloe even having parents, although of course she did. I should have sent a condolence card, or something. Whatever I thought of Chloe, her parents must still be grieving terribly.”

  “There’s just her mom, and it’s not too late,” I said. “I’m sure Wanda would appreciate hearing from you. I know she misses Chloe terribly.”

  Molly looked at me eagerly. “Do you think so?”

  “Definitely. Can you tell me how come Chloe never had to pay for her treatment?”

  Molly sat quietly for a moment, and then she said, “I’m sorry. I really shouldn’t talk about any of this.”

  I leaned forward and said intently, “Look, Molly. It’s all going to come out sooner or later. The worst thing to do would be to force Jupiter’s lawyers to get a court order. They’ll get access to the files, they’ll compel depositions of all of you. If you talk to me, we might be able just to leave it at that. And you’ll be helping Jupiter.”

  She knotted her hands in her lap nervously. “I want to do what I can for him. Really, I do. But I want you to understand—Reese is an incredible man. I was a junkie when I came here, and I’m completely sober now. I owe him a lot.”

  “You owe yourself a lot. You’re the one who did the work.”

  “But without his help I wouldn’t have been able to do it. He taught me so much. He helped me to realize why I was drawn to the heroin. He helped me to remember what my father did to me when I was a little girl.”

  I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole. And I needed to stop her before she decided that she owed the doctor unmitigated loyalty.

  “So Dr. Blackmore was the one who paid for Chloe’s treatment?”

  “Not exactly. I mean, I’m not sure how the billing went, but I don’t think anyone paid for it. She showed up one day, and Reese told me to check her in as a special resident and not bother with a billing form.”

  “So she came for free?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did Dr. Blackmore tell you about their relationship?”

  “Nothing,” she said softly. There wasn’t any surprise in her voice, though, at the necessary implication of my question.

  “Did you have any suspicions about them? Did you think they might have been, er, romantically involved?” I couldn’t quite bring myself to suggest to the young woman that her idolized therapist and boss paid young women to have sex with him.

  “That’s a ridiculous suggestion. Look, Chloe might have acted like they were. I practically had to pry her off him to take her to her room. But first of all, Reese would never do anything like that. And second of all, it became very clear that that was just Chloe’s way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What happened with Jupiter, of course.”

  “You mean their relationship?” I said.

  “Within a day or two it was clear that something was going on between Jupiter and Chloe. They did everything together. They ate together, they hung out together. One day in group she was even massaging his feet. It was pretty gross.” She frowned with a vehemence that betrayed, once again, her feelings for the young man.

  “Did you tell Dr. Blackmore about it?”

  “You bet I did. I told him that if they weren’t sleeping together now, they were going to be soon. Jupiter just wasn’t ready for that kind of intimacy. It was distracting him from his recovery work. It was getting in the way of his therapy. And it was supposed to be against the rules.”

  “Did Dr. Blackmore force them to break it off?”

  She snorted. “He tried to. He called them into his office, and I guess they said they’d stop. At first I thought they had. And anyway, Jupiter finished the program, and I figured that was that.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “Obviously not.”

  The son of Polaris Jones, the extravagantly wealthy religious leader, would have seemed like a terrific catch for a stripper with a drug habit. I could see why Chloe would have gotten involved with Jupiter, and I could certainly imagine why, once she realized the extent of his dependence on his father and the limitation of his own resources, she’d set her sights on the real cash-cow, Polaris. But whatever his assistant believed, I was certain Chloe already had Dr. Blackmore, a wildly successful doctor who was clearly crazy about her. Why would she have needed to look any farther afield?

  “Is the clinic in financial trouble?” I asked.

  Molly glanced at me, surprised. “No, we’re doing fine.”

  “Not even with the debate over False Memory Syndrome?”

  She sighed. “That. Yes, well, of course that hurt us, for a while. Memory therapy is an integral part of the recovery process here at the center. We even have a saying: ‘There is no recovery without the recovery of memory.’”

  “Did people stop coming to the clinic because they objected to the theory?”

  She nodded. “For a little while. You have to understand. There’s a lot of resistance to recovered memory. People repress memories for one reason and one reason only, because they’re traumatic. Recovering them, and facing the trauma, is incredibly painful. A person only becomes ready to face that pain when the alternative is worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “Well, like, for example, when their addiction is about to kill them, and they can’t kick the drugs because the drugs are only a symptom of the problem, not the real issue.”

  “And the center felt the effects of the False Memory Syndrome movement?”

  “We did, for a brief while. But that was a long time ago.”

  “But don’t you have a lot of CCU clients? I read that the CCU threatened to pull its parishioners and its funding.”

  She frowned. “That’s ridiculous. I mean I think they once floated the idea of opening their own clinic, and that might have hurt us. But our work here is unparalleled. I’m sure all it took was a brief examination to figure out what a huge undertaking it would be for them to try to provide similar services.”

  My web research had indicated more than just an idea being “floated.” There had, it seemed, been a firm plan to open up a CCU clinic. The CCU’s discomfort with the recovered memory movement had come at a time when Dr. Blackmore had been losing many of his clients to the same suspicions. What if Chloe hadn’t betrayed her benefactor after all? What if her relationship with the son of the CCU’s spiritual leader had been entirely Blackmore’s idea? He had introduced her to Jupiter at a time when the future of his clinic seemed in doubt. She had gone on to marry Polaris, and Blackmore’s relationship with the CCU had been sealed. Was it Chloe who had convinced Polaris to continue his support of Reese’s clinic?

  Even if all that were true, I still couldn’t figure out what any of this had to do with Chloe’s blackmailing of Lilly. And I still had no idea who killed her.

  Molly left me to my musing and went to let Jupiter know I was waiting for him. It was hard to believe that the man who sauntered up to me on the terrace was the same person who I’d last seen cowering at a table in the visiting room of the county jail. Unwound from his defensive crouch, he looked at least six inches taller. His skin had lost its jailhouse pallor and glowed with the kind of golden tan I’d always coveted. His hair was clean and parted neatly in the middle.

  He sat down, leaned back, and smiled at me. I smiled back.

  “Happy to be out?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Oh yeah. It was in the nick of time. Just. Another week and I might have . . . I don’t know. Done something.”

  I frowned. I knew Jupiter understood that if he was convicted, he would have to go back there, and on to prison. Obviously, however, his relief at being freed, even into the somewhat constricting arms of the Ojai center, was so profound that it transcended worry about what the future might hold.

  “It sucks a
bout Lilly,” he said. “The papers and everything.”

  I nodded. “It does.”

  “She didn’t kill Chloe,” he said. “I know she didn’t.”

  “I know,” I said, wishing I could be as sure as he was.

  “This is my fault. I brought this on everyone. She was a horrible person, Chloe was. She was poison. I poisoned everyone when I let her into our lives.”

  There wasn’t anything I could say to comfort him. Instead, I took a deep breath, and said, “Jupiter, Al and I are not going to be able to stay on your case. It wouldn’t be ethical for us to continue taking Lilly’s money, now that she’s become a suspect.”

  “Wasserman said he’d continue representing me for free,” Jupiter said.

  “I know. I wish we could do that. But it’s more than just a financial issue.” I explained to Jupiter how my friendship with Lilly compromised my representation of him, since it was entirely possible that their interests would conflict now that she was a likely target both for the defense’s theory of the case and for the prosecution’s. As I spoke, I realized that I should have pulled out long before, when I had first had an inkling that Lilly might somehow be involved. All that was in the past, however. Right now I needed to do the correct thing.

  Jupiter wasn’t happy, but ultimately he told me he understood. I held my hand out to him, and he shook it firmly. He gripped my palm in his and said, “Lilly didn’t kill Chloe. You should help her prove that.”

  I only wished I could.

  Twenty-five

  I had to see Lilly. I called again and told her assistant that I was going to take the kids to a beach in Malibu that I knew Lilly liked, and that I hoped she’d join me there. I bundled Ruby and Isaac into the car and packed a bag with sand toys, towels, and extra clothes. The fog lay in a thick mantle along the shore, wreathing the beach in icy tendrils and hiding the ocean almost entirely from view. I wrapped myself up in a sweater and a warm hat as I waited for Lilly to arrive, but Ruby and Isaac were impervious to the chill. They kicked off their shoes and socks, rolled up their jeans, and danced in and out of the surf, squealing whenever the water hit their ankles.

  Just when I was about to give up on Lilly, Amber and Jade tore across the sand, screaming Ruby’s name and ululating like a couple of banshees. Lilly plopped down next to me on the ratty cotton bedspread I’d laid out on the sand. She was traveling incognito, a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead and huge, round sunglasses hiding her famous azure eyes.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  She pointed at a young man who had followed her twins down to the water. “I brought Patrick with me. He’ll watch the kids so we can talk.”

  The nanny was crouched down next to Isaac, ruffling his hair. As we watched, he reached into the teal blue backpack slung over his shoulder and pulled out a frisbee. Within moments he had all four kids standing in a circle, flinging the disk in the vague direction of one another. I could get used to this kind of parenting. It was a lot easier to enjoy being with your kids if someone else was actually playing the games with them. I wondered, in Lilly’s position would I feel guilty? Would I feel like I should be the one running around on the sand with my children, instead of the cheerful young nanny? Perhaps. But perhaps not. After all, it wasn’t like I’d been doing a whole lot of playing before Lilly and her brood showed up. I’d been huddled on the sand, watching Ruby and Isaac entertain themselves, and not for a minute feeling like I was neglecting them. Anyway, chances were I was never going to have to debate the pros and cons of too much childcare. I couldn’t afford it, and even if Peter’s screenwriting career really took off and pushed us into a different economic bracket, chances were I’d be too disorganized and busy to get around to hiring my own team of nannies.

  Lilly and I watched the kids in silence for a while. I kicked off my shoes and scooted down to the edge of the bedspread. I dug my toes into the cold sand. Lilly followed me and kicked sand over my feet, burying them.

  “Oooh,” I said, wriggling my feet. “Popsicle toes.”

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Better.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And you?”

  “Better,” she said, and smiled.

  I smiled back. “Good. Hey, guess what? I’m having a girl.”

  She smiled at me. “Congratulations. Girls are great.”

  “Yeah, they are.” We sat in silence for a little while, watching our girls romp in the sand.

  “Are you really okay, Lilly?”

  She nodded, and then shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess so. Beverly says just to lie low and wait for it to blow over.”

  “That’s probably all you can do. Did the prosecutor ask for an interview?”

  She nodded. “My lawyers gave them a statement. You know, I didn’t do anything to Chloe, that kind of thing. I’ll let them figure out how much to tell the DA, and when. It’s not like there’s any evidence linking me to the crime, or anything.”

  “Of course not,” I said. Although of course there was. The money paid to Chloe’s account. The request to Jupiter that he talk to Chloe. All that could be used as circumstantial evidence against Lilly.

  “And your parents?” I asked. “Are they doing okay? I mean, I noticed some tension when I saw them.”

  Lilly snorted. “‘Tension.’ That’s one word for it.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  She shrugged. “The added pressure isn’t doing them any good, but things haven’t been great with them for quite a while. Ever since my dad was forced to retire after my mom was appointed Speaker. I think he just doesn’t know what to do with himself, and when my dad’s bored . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What? What does he do when he’s bored?”

  She shook her head. “He tries to find something to entertain himself. Something young, and pretty.”

  “He’s having an affair?”

  She laughed bitterly. “An affair? Probably more like ten. Or fifteen. My dad’s always been like that. I told you about the Topanga commune.”

  “Have you always known about his affairs?”

  “We both knew. Both me and my mom. I mean, Beverly. Although of course my real mother knew, too. It was even more out in the open back then. They’re children of the sixties, don’t forget. Free love and all that crap. I guess my dad figured that if he told us everything, then he wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  “Does Beverly have affairs?”

  “My mom? No. Never. She’s not like that. She loves my dad, and that’s it. Or that was it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s finally getting sick of it, I guess. I mean, now that it’s becoming a political embarrassment for her. She’s humiliated, and I’m worried that she’s going to decide she’s not willing to put up with him anymore.”

  “Do you think they might get divorced?”

  Lilly heaved a sigh. “God, I hope not. But I don’t know. After his most recent fling, she told him he had one last chance. We’ll see what happens. He’ll probably screw it up. He always does.” She twisted her mouth into a rueful frown. “I can’t talk about this anymore. It makes me too depressed. Tell me what’s happening with the case. That ought to cheer me right up.”

  I kicked my feet loose and said, “The case. Yeah. Well, you’ll probably understand why we can’t continue to work for Jupiter.”

  She nodded. “I figured as much.”

  “But there is something I want to talk to you about. I’ve been doing a little research on repressed memory.”

  Her smile faded. “Really?”

  I nodded. “Have you ever heard of False Memory Syndrome?”

  She didn’t answer. I waited. Finally, after a few moments she said, “I talked to Dr. Blackmore about that a few years ago. I read an article about it in the L.A. Times. You can imagine how I felt. I called him right away, and we had an emergency session. A few sessions.”

 
“What did he say?”

  “He told me that the research on false memories is really spotty. Nobody’s proved that they even exist.”

  I refrained from pointing out to her that the same was essentially true for the theory of recovered memory.

  “He’s very sure that my memories are accurate,” she continued.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Lilly, are you sure that you killed your mother?”

  Her shoulders began to shake. I thought for a moment that she must be crying, but her eyes were dry. She was trembling, as if the cool sea breeze had grown to a frigid gale. I reached an arm around her and hugged her close. Her shoulder blades were as sharp as a bird’s, and I felt them poking into the skin of my inner arm.

  “Lilly?”

  “I’ve been sure. I’ve known that I did this for so long. My entire life. I’m the girl who shot her mother, and who managed with years of therapy to salvage a life for herself. It’s who I am. Little Girl Q. That’s what Dr. Blackmore called me, did you know that? He wrote about my case in psychology journals.”

  “I know. I read some of the articles.”

  “When I read about false memories, I panicked. I know it sounds crazy, but I was reassured when Dr. Blackmore told me that it really had happened. That I really had killed her. Everything I’ve done in my life, everything I am, is to make up for this horrible thing that I did when I was five years old. What would it mean if it weren’t true? Who would I be?”

  I clasped her bony frame closer. I understood that it was terrifying for Lilly to imagine that the truth on which she’d based her life, the trauma from which she’d always tried to recover, had never really happened. But was that really worse than living forever with the guilt? Wouldn’t bringing an end to the guilt also liberate her from the trauma?

  Except, of course, that if the memories were wrong, if she hadn’t done it, there would be a whole other kind of horror to imagine. Lilly had been silent after her mother’s death. She had not assumed responsibility for the terrible crime. Another person had implicated her, had blamed her: Polaris Jones. The man who sat at her bedside, hovered over her, cared for her. Had he struggled to end her catatonia, or had he been responsible for it? The chilling image of a stepfather whispering lies of her guilt into the ear of a devastated and silent girl filled me with a cold, sick horror.